A buoyant Herman Cain stumped for big bucks in Manhattan yesterday — declaring he had survived a slew of sex-harassment charges.
“The good news is it didn’t destroy my campaign,” he said on Talk Radio 1300 AM.
Cain admitted the harassment claims “are creating a little cloud over my head.”
But he said his campaign war chest is fatter than ever.
“The day the allegations broke, on a Monday, where it was the story of the day, that was the highest fund-raising day in the history of the campaign since we started in January,” he said. “And guess what? That whole week we had record fund-raising days.”
Cain kept a low profile for most of yesterday, dodging reporters — by going through the kitchen and out a service door — at a fund-raising reception at the Russian Tea Room that drew an estimated 200 to 250 people.
“Very big turnout. It was packed in there,” said one of the attendees, Godfrey Morales, co-owner of a technology firm.
Cain later addressed campaign contributors at the posh Club 101 on Park Avenue.
New polls showed Cain did take a hit from the harassment controversy. His support from female Republican primary voters fell from 28 percent last month to 15 percent, a CBS poll released yesterday found.
Thirty percent of all GOP primary voters said they were less likely to vote for him, the survey found, but he still led the eight-candidate field with 18 percent.
A separate Marist poll of Republicans and GOP-leaning independents found Cain dropped to third place with 17 percent, behind Mitt Romney’s 23 percent and a surging Newt Gingrich, who had 19 percent.
Also in yesterday’s radio interview, Cain said he was now under extraordinary scrutiny.
“I call it flyspecking. Every word I say now is going to be flyspecked by somebody, and somebody who does not support Herman Cain, they’re going to try to spin it into a negative,” Cain said.
He said that was the case when he was accused of denigrating Anita Hill, who in 1991 accused Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment.
Cain said that one of his supporters had joked to him, “Anita Hill is trying to contact you,” and that he had responded, in a joke, “Is she going to endorse me?”
“It was in no way intended to be an insult towards Anita Hill,” Cain said yesterday.